Hospitals and other organizations routinely urge people to give blood, bone marrow and even some organs, but Texas Children's Hospital is launching a different kind of donor program: breast milk.

The Houston pediatric hospital is asking nursing mothers in the area to donate their excess milk, which has proved life-saving for prematurely born babies whose mothers are unable to produce enough to meet the infant's needs.

"The evidence is overwhelming that these critically ill preemies do best on mother's milk, the reason we only feed breast milk in our neonatal intensive care unit," said Nancy Hurst, a Texas Children's nurse and director of the new donor milk program. "Ideally, they get their own mother's milk, but donor milk is the next best thing."

Around the nation, the use of donor breast milk has grown dramatically in recent years. The nation's nonprofit donor milk banks last year processed and dispensed 1.8 million ounces, up from about 325,000 in 1999. The increased demand has caused the banks to issue urgent appeals for donors.

That demand mostly relates to the nation's roughly 51,000 very low birth weight babies who survive childbirth every year, babies who weigh 3.3 pounds or less. It would take nearly 9 million ounces of donor milk to provide all those babies what the mothers themselves can't produce.

But the growing demand is also reflected in an emerging movement known as "milk trafficking," in which individuals or groups trade, buy or sell breast milk, such as on the website onlythebreast.com. The Food and Drug Administration last year warned against using such individually acquired milk because it's unlikely to have been adequately screened for infectious disease or contamination risk.

Since 2009, Texas Children's had got its donor milk from the Mothers' Milk Bank at Austin, one of 10 U.S. nonprofit banks, all of which screen the donor mothers' blood and pasteurize the milk. Texas Children's will now maintain its own bank, though the pasteurizing will be done at a for-profit plant in California.

'Liquid gold'

Breast milk has been shown to lower the incidence of an often fatal condition in preemies known as necrotizing enterocolitis, which occurs when the lining of the intestinal wall dies. Texas Children's rate of the condition dropped from 10 to 12 percent, the national average, to 2 percent after it began using breast milk 100 percent of the time in 2009.

Among the grateful mothers is Lashorna Latique Foote, who on July 13 gave birth, three months early, to Kelby Elizabeth, 1 pound, 10 ounces. When Foote was unable to produce much breast milk, Kelby received donor milk at Texas Children's and is responding great, according to doctors.

"That milk is liquid gold," says Foote, marveling at Kelby's early development. "What else explains how someone so tiny and fragile could do so well? Everything the doctors tell me is that she's progressing on the schedule she needs to be on."

The 'yuck factor'

Foote admits to being initially uncomfortable with donated milk, a not uncommon reaction that has been described as "the yuck factor." Foote, initially worried Kelby could be more connected to the milk's donor than her, came around after a lactation expert and a nurse reassured her — it's no different from getting donated blood, experts say - and now she enthusiastically recommends the practice.

In another form, donor milk dates to more than 2,000 years before Christ, when the Code of Hammurabi set forth the qualities for a good wet nurse, women who breast-fed others' babies. Wet nurses fell out of favor in the developed world around the turn of the 20th century, after researchers found the milk could transfer diseases to newborns. Milk banks emerged not long after.

The appeal of donor breast milk is particularly strong because it's common for mothers of premature babies to struggle to produce milk. Other reasons a mother may produce too little milk or none at all include the stress of the ICU environment, multiple births, separation from the infant, adoption and her own medical condition or medications she's on.

Also, premature infants often arrive at hospitals such as Texas Children's well before the mother, transferred from remote locations.

Mothers' response

Texas Children's treats about 3,000 very low birth weight babies a year - about a third receive their mother's own milk, a third receive almost exclusively donor milk and a third receive a mix. Medicaid and most insurance plans cover the charge for donor milk, which is given with a doctor's prescription.

Under the Texas Children's program, donor mothers pump extra milk at home, then send it off by FedEx to the California plant that not only pasteurizes it but fortifies it with calories and nutrients before returning it to the Houston hospital. The pasteurization process kills a little of the milk's key immune factor, but 70 percent remains. There is none of the immune factor in formula.

Hurst said she's confident Houston's nursing mothers will respond to the call.

"It's been great working with Mothers' Milk Bank, but the time is right for us to start our own bank," said Hurst. "I think a lot of women, many of them already connected to Texas Children's, will be happy to donate, knowing it's going to a local NICU."